Sony Computer Entertainment America are now facing a lawsuit due to “deceptive marketing” of Killzone: Shadow Fall. It’s not the first time graphics have been touted as better than they actually are in a game, you only have to look at any TV advert for a game to realise they now have to legally add “not in-game footage” to most of what they show. The case here however is a little more in the fine print, with Douglas Ladore of California suing Sony because their game doesn’t meet the advertised resolution when played in multiplayer modes.

Sony advertised the the game would run at a native 1080p resolution but that it “used a technological shortcut that was supposed to provide ‘subjectively similar’ results.” See: they used a lower resolution. An analysis of the graphics shows that the games multiplayer actually runs at 960 x 1080px, not 1920 x 1080, a significant shortfall despite the use of a “high quality temporal upscale”. See: The image was stretched.

Sony advertised 1080p on their videos, websites, social media and the retail packaging “Unfortunately, Sony’s marketing and on-box representations turned out to be nothing more than fiction,” the lawsuit says.

This may sound like petty squabbling, but this is seriously important for the games industry. It’s false advertising and it’s about time publishers stopped taking advantage of consumers with buzz words that simply don’t apply to their products.

The suit seeks over $5,000,000 from Sony and was filed by law firm Edelson PC. The suit states that “temporal reprojection” a method of constructing a scene from multiple low resolution frames, a form of upscaling technology, is not native 1080p. This is especially obvious given that the single player aspect of the game does render in native 1080p without the use of upscaling.

This one could get interesting, perhaps more research will turn up even more games that don’t match the specs that are being touted on the box.

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